Creating a dynamic and rich input form for assets

[Quali-Community]

Following a request that we had from a customer, I decided to prepare a sample of an architecture for having a complex input for a Step in an asset. 

The assumed use case is that during design time the user wants to drag a step to the canvas and easily edit a complex set of parameters, with dependencies, and nice UI. He will also want to edit the Step.

 

This is mainly a concept, feel free to comment your thoughts.

 

Attached is both the .Net project and the dll asset itself (if you just want to play with this but don't want to compile the project).

The main idea for this design is to have for each relevant function in the asset to have 2 input fields:

LoadSelector (int 0/1)

Data (string)

and one return value (string).

 

Whenever the LoadSelector is set to 0, the function will behave normally (do something) and will get it's data from the "data" input parameter (which is a formatted string from several parameters).

The "Magic" Happens When the user sets the Load Selector to 1 and hit activate:

 

In the asset (see attached c# project) when the load Selector is set to 1, it loads the parameters form

 Now the user will choose the appropriate parameters, using a dedicated form, tailor made for his needs (field dependencies, complex selections etc.)

When hitting OK, the user will get the formatted string as an output. 

All he has to do is to copy the data from the output to the "data" input, and set the LoadSelector to 0.

 In the asset itself we will need to parse the string to get the data, this can be done in more complex ways than presented in the attached example.

 Attachments:

ClassLibrary1.dll [9KB]	ClassLibrary1.rar [64KB]	Screenshot_1.png [54KB]	Screenshot_2.png [45KB]	Screenshot_3.png [42KB]	Screenshot_4.png [24KB]	Screenshot_5.png [52KB]

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 (Quali) - 04/20/2016 07:59 PM

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